Links

Recent tweets

BiLog: 75 Reporting with RTF…..Rich Text Formatting or Reporting to the Fullest!

Throughout the last few BiLog’s
we’ve been introducing you to the new report features in the recently released
7.5 product – while keeping you immersed in acronyms, Boston Red Sox Trivia and
other amazing facts on erasers and how long it took to build Rome.

And while you may expect a trend
here to continue, let me take a slight detour
and introduce a new backronym, RTF.If
you’re not familiar with backronyms, it is where you have an acronym – and then
find the words to form one. So – while you
would expect RTF in this entry to stand for RichTextFormatting….it really stands
for Reporting To the Fullest.

I’m pretty sure that one won’t make its way to Wikipedia….so let’s quickly move on to describing another new great feature in
the 7.5 release - where you now can input rich text in the long
description fields of applications.This enables you to highlight certain areas of critical information for
your users.

What’s key for the reporting folks – is that when your users input text
in bold, colors, italics or other fancy fonts in the maximo applications, that
same formatting will show in the reports. For all the out of the box reports using long
description fields, the rich text font has been enabled.Additionally, you may have created custom
reports which include the long description field.The steps to update these custom reports to
use rich text formatting are shown below.

To enable your custom report to display rich text formatting in the long
description field, there are three simple steps you will need to follow in the
report designer.

1.First, if the long description field exists in
the report, delete it.

2.Next,
insert a Dynamic Text field.

3.Finally,
set the property set and add the field attribute.

Once you have updated your custom
report, import its updated design file into the report repository, and your
users will now be able to see any rich text they input in the maximo
applications on the corresponding report.

More details and screenshots on
modifying your custom reports are contained in the V75 Report Developers Guide,
detailed here:http://ibm.co/m2lkeT

Additionally, you can view the details
on the delivered reports which are enabled for RTF display in the V75 Report
Booklet, which can be found herehttp://bit.ly/jND1CX